The War Stories of William Faulkner

Author(s): Douglas Day

Source: The Georgia Review , WINTER - 1961, Vol. 15, No. 4 (WINTER - 1961), pp. 385-
394
Published by: Georgia Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41395818

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 The War Stories of William Faulkner
By Douglas Day

IN Birds:
Birds:1926
DiaryDiary
of anthere
Ùnknoum
of was Aviator,1
an Ùnknoumin which
published
are described
Aviator,1the
anonymously in which a work are described entitled War the
adventures of a very young Southerner as a pilot with the Royal Fly-
ing Corps in 191 7 and 1918. It is an awkward, amateurish book, but
it provides a remarkable vehicle for tracing the changing attitudes of
those young men who found themselves involved in the shocking emo-
tional experience of total, modern warfare without having been given
any idea of what to expect.
The mind of the young cadet as he sails for England is full of the
desire for adventure and the spirit of knight-errantry which still re-
mained in the South, only slightly altered after the Civil War.
I am leaving my continent as well as my country and am going forth
in search of adventure, which I hope to find. . . . Thank God, I am
going to have the opportunity to die as every brave man should wish
to die- fighting- and fighting for my country as well. (p. 9.)

These lofty sentiments are basically unchanged when the cadet com-
pletes his training and enters combat for the first time, although he
has become somewhat calloused in his attitude toward life and death:
"I'm either coming out of the war a big man or a wooden kimono. I
know I can fight, I know I can fly, and I ought to be able to shoot
straight" (p. 135).
But, after a few months at the front, something happens to the
young adventurer: "I can't write much these days. I'm too nervous.
I can hardly hold a pen. I'm all right in the air . . . but on the ground
I'm a wreck and I get panicky" (p. 326). In the chaos and violence
of war he matures quickly, losing almost overnight the romanticized
conception of warfare with which his heritage had equipped him. Fin-
ally, a few days before he is killed, we see the ultimate effect of the
unexpected brutality and destruction to which he has been exposed:
War is a horrible thing, a grotesque comedy. And it is so useless.
This war won't prove anything. All we'll do when we win is to
1. New York: George H. Doran Co. (Mr. Faulkner informe me that this is the
diary of a friend of his, Mac Crider, as edited by another ex-aviator, Elliott White
Springs, author of several flying stories about the first World War.)

[385]

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 386 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

substitute some sort of dictator for another. In the meantime we have

destroyed our best resources. Human life, the most precious thing in
the world, has become the cheapest, (p. 268.)

The description of the death of such archaic notions as gallantry

and chivalry at the hands of the modern military machinery become
a common motif in the "lost generation" fiction of the post-World
War I decade, especially in the works of John Dos Passos, E. E. Cum-
rnings, and Ernest Hemingway, where disillusionment with the war
becomes the dominant theme. These were the tales of the sensitive
heroes whose souls were blighted by the monster, War. Their ideals
were shattered, all their values destroyed. Yet, as Frederick J. Hoffman
says, "Their disillusionment was sometimes an affectation; it was some-
times an excuse for freeing themselves from certain moral commit-
ments. They pointed to the war as a blanket apology for their way
of life. How could anyone possibly discredit the 'queer things they
did' when the world itself had just gone through a monstrous display
of disorder and stupidity?"2
By the end of the postwar decade, the critics were becoming tired
of the "War is Hell" school of literature; and it is perhaps for this
reason that William Faulkner's war stories, the first four of which
appeared in 193 1, 8 were largely ignored. In almost all of the reviews
of These iß, the war stories were slighted by the critics, who stressed
the importance of the Mississippi stories. The disregard has, in fact,
continued through the 1950's and up to the present. In 195 1, we find
Irving Howe saying of the war stories that "They are specimens of a
class rather than individual works of art; specimens of the war story
in which a writer, facing an experience impossible to order, invokes
its terror and pity through tense understatement.'4 And for William
Van O'Connor, "None of these ... is particularly distinguishable in its
harsh subject matter or unqualifiedly bitter irony from war stories
written by John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, or Hervey Allen."5
2. The Twenties: American Writing in the Postimr Decade (New York, 1955),
p.78.
3. In These IS (New York, 1931). Of the four ("Ad Astra", "Victory", "Crevasse",
and "All the Dead Pilots") only "Ad Astra" had appeared earlier, in American
Caravan TV , ed. Kreymborg, Mumford, and Rosenfeld (New York, 1931). The
fifth story, "Turnabout", appeared originally in the Saturday Evening Post , CCIV
(5 March, 1932); and was later published in Doctor Martino and Other Stories
(New York, 1934).
4. William Faulkner : A Critical Studii (New York. 1951). d.190l
5. The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (New York, 1954), p.67.

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 WILLIAM FAULKNER 387

In general, these five stories are "lost generation" fic

take as their theme the needless cruelty and the ut
Four of them, at least ("Turnabout" is the exceptio
negative in tone, with "lost" or "dead" protagon
conflicts. But the reader who does not turn a ja
disillusionment-with-war narratives is likely to find
in these heretofore unexplored stories.
In "Ad Astra," the best of the group, we see t
desolation of the characters that we have noted in
of War Birds. Bayard Sartoris, Bland, and the narra
Southerners of gentle birth who have volunteered
have won their spurs in the romantic new Roya
flyers they are, as they were in the South, aristocr
of all that was most romantic and idealistic in the
what their companion Monaghan calls their "godda
glory and gentlemen," they have come, like the avi
adventure and to have the opportunity to die fighting
But something has happened to them, too:

I don't know what we were. ... we had started out Americans, but
after three years, in our British tunics and British wings and here and
there a ribbon, I don't suppose we had even bothered in three years
to wonder what we were, to think or to remember.®

They have sacrificed a great deal more than their identity as Ameri-
cans, however: Bayard Sartoris has become a drunken neurotic, full of
feelings of guilt over the loss of his twin brother five months earlier, and
already possessed by the strong necrophilia which ultimately causes
his death. After John Sartoris's crash, Bayard has exacted revenge in
the accepted tradition of the Southern gentility, by shooting down
his brother's killer. But he derives no satisfaction from his revenge, and
"After that ... he never did talk much; just did his patrols and maybe
once a week he'd sit and drink his nostrils white in a quiet sort of
way" (p. 414).
When we see Gerald Bland in Part II of The Sound and the Fury,
the action of which takes place in 19 14, he is a handsome, spoiled
Kentuckian whose mother is his constant companion at Harvard. Four

6. Collected Stories of William, Faulkner (New York, 1950), p.407.

(All page references to the stories will be to this edition.)

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 388 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

years later, in "Ad Astra," he is as handsome and i

("I could see why men didn't like him and why wo
there is a new dimension to Bland: although he ins
"saved his destiny" in spite of the war, and although h
as great as ever, in reality he is insecure and frighten
ments of bathos to reveries about an imaginary wife-
of the security and stability which he has lost.
The narrator, the fictive "I" of "Ad Astra," Uve
present. Like the other aristocrats, he drinks. But "The
able point, a climax, in weariness. Even alcohol cann
(p. 423). And when alcohol fails to alleviate his sense of
of the past and the future, the narrator seeks to forg
by means of violent and immediate action.

Beneath the alcohol I could feel that hot, hard ball be

stomach, like a combat, like when you know someth
happen; that instant when you think Now. Now I ca
thing overboard and just be. Now Now. It is quite ple

These three aristocrats represent more or less con

generation" figures; in themselves they are not unusu
of fiction. The strength of "Ad Astra" lies in the rema
There are the fighters, Comyn and Monaghan, shanty
have been dragged into the war by the same illusions o
have deluded the Southerners, but who have no false
romanticism; they are harder, more realistic. They are
and so are not subject to the same fate which awaits th
Along with the callous, crude M. P., they are, as Faul
"the tough guys who hold our wars together."7 Co
back on an unthinking sensuality and aggressiveness,
("I'm not a soldier, I'm not a gentleman. I'm not anythi
sumed by anger and scorn for the society which has
him.

There was something of the crucified about Monaghan, too: furious,

inarticulate not with stupidity but at it, like into him more than any
of us had distilled the ceased drums of the old lust and greed awaking
at last aghast at their own impotence and accrued despair, (p. 416)

7. From a conversation with Mr. Faulkner in April of 1959.

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 WILLIAM FAULKNER 389

But, because they have unthinkingly permitted t

the aristocrats' false banner of idealism, Monagha
doomed as the Southerners.
The subadar, sergeant-major of an Indian regiment, who is from an
older, wiser race; and the German, who sees the "victory of defeat,"
are the ones whose spirits remain intact. They know that, as the subadar
says, "A nation vanquishes its banners. ... A man conquers himself."
It is in these two that we sense the note of affirmation in "Ad Astra":
that man cannot survive so long as he tries to establish his roots in false
pride and nationalism- that man cannot survive in spirit until he
realizes that he must identify himself not with a shallow idealism or a
materialistic cause, but only with his fellow men. It is the message of
the subadar that "All men are brothers" which sets the moral of "Ad
Astra." The subadar will not go back to India to resume his place
in what he feels to be an artificial social order; and the German, by
destroying all his ties with the past- his identification papers and
his insignia- in effect removes himself from the doomed Prussian
aristocracy. The point Faulkner implies is that Bland, Sartoris, and
"I" are already dead because they will return to a society in which
they will have to live by certain precepts which they know now to be
fallacious. It for this reason that they are as dead as "those who have
been four years rotting out yonder" (p. 421).
"All the Dead Pilots," which might be considered a companion-piece
to "Ad Astra," is, at its best, a prime example of Faulknerian humor.
Here, the "lost generation" motif is a definite flaw in the story, and
Faulkner describes the World War I pilots not as they must have been,
but with the unmistakably romantic and wistful eye of the man who
wishes he could have been there but was not. Basically, it is the simple
story of a conflict involving John Sartoris, his squadron commander,
and a dog; and, when "All the Dead Pilots" keeps to this plot, it is one
of Faulkner's funniest stories. But there are constant references to the
same idea we have seen in "Ad Astra"; and, without the intensity and
solidity given the theme in the earlier story by the subadar and the
German, this idea seems shallow and even faintly embarrassing. There
is an uncomfortable air of melodrama about such passages as this:

But they were all dead now. They are thick men now, a little thick
about the waist from sitting behind desks, and maybe not so good at it,
with wives and children in suburban homes almost paid out, with

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 3ÇO THE GEORGIA REVIEW

gardens in which they putter in the long even

and perhaps not so good at that either: the ha
gered hard and drank hard because they ha
was not as quiet as they had heard it would

The silent, relentless struggle of John Sart

Captain Spoomer and his canine opposite n
source of the humor in "All the Dead Pilo
much deeper significance to this questionable
young flyers who survive the war. For Spoo
damot be touched by the war because he is s
more sinister implications are lost on him. W
Spoomer (although he does not allow it to int
life) ; but it will certainly never affect him v
ner's mocking portrait of the Colonel Bli
through life without ever becoming consciou
others.
Bayard's twin, while almost totally inarticulate ("Sartoris had a
working vocabulary of perhaps two hundred words"), is not nearly
so insensitive as Spoomer. And if Spoomer is invulnerable, Sartoris is
invincible. His only purpose in life is to harass Spoomer, who has (in
a very unBlimp-lilce way) stolen two girls from him. Since Spoomer
is invulnerable, Sartoris has only the dog on which to effect his revenge.
This he does with a monumental single-mindedness:

. . . Sartoris dived at the dog and then looped, making two turns of
an upward spin, coming off on one wing and still upside down. . . .
at a hundred feet the engine conked, and upside down Sartoris cut
the tops out of the only two poplar trees they had left.
The sergeant said they ran then, toward the gout of dust and the
mess of wire and wood. Before they reached it, he said the dog came
trotting out from behind the men's mess. He said the dog got there
first and that they saw Sartoris on his hands and knees, vomiting, while
the dog watched him. Then the dog approached and sniffed ten-
tatively at the vomit and Sartoris got up and balanced himself and
kicked it, weakly but with savage and earnest purpose, (p. 527)

The war now means no more to the monomaniacal Sartoris than it

does to Spoomer. He senses that he will be killed, but he does not care
about life any more than his brother, Bayard, does. He dies, but his
death is not of the same sort that awaits those who survive the war:

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 WILLIAM FAULKNER 391

November 11, 1918, couldn't kill him, c

little thicker each year behind an offic
been hard and lean and immediate grown
and betrayed, because that day he had b
(p. 521).

In "All the Dead Pilots," therefore, we are shown a war so meaning-

less, so unimportant, that it can be overshadowed by a ridiculous
quarrel between a fool and a neurotic. That Sartoris is brave means
nothing here, where "no man deserves praise for courage or opprobrium
for cowardice, since there are situations in which any man will show
either of them" (p. 513). John Sartoris emerges victorious because
he dies all at oncc, instead of by degrees. He escapes a meaningless
later life by undergoing a meaningless immediate death.
The negativismi is so extreme here, and the central thought so murky
and ambiguous, that we may agree with Lionel Trilling when he says,
in his critique of the flying stories, that Faulkner

. . . uses an inarticulate society of isolated young men who in civilian

life were separated from many of the realities of existence by their
aristocracy and who in the war are yet more isolated by the aristocracy
of the flying corps, and their love of death. Here, because the
philosophical importance of emotions depends on their articulateness
and their universality, Mr. Faulkner's emotions fail of final meaning
and become highflown and sentimental.8

Another aspect of the evil which is caused by war is shown in

"Victory," the story of the young Scots shipbuilder who becomes an
officer and gentleman in wartime, only to become a beggar in peace.
Young Alec Gray is a simple, almost illiterate member of the lower
class at the time of his enlistment. He rises, partly through heroism
and partly through accident, to the rank of Captain at the war's end.
Gray finds himself in a dilemma: he is unwilling to descend to his
former social level; and the war, while it has allowed him to live as a
gentleman for the duration, has not equipped him to live as a gentleman
in peacetime. Thus, when the artificial military society is dissolved,
Alec Gray is stranded. He is a failure at business; and, his misguided
sense of pride not permitting him to return to his family, he becomes
a beggar.
8. "Mr. Faulkner's World", The Nation, CXXXIII (4 Nov. 31), 491-492.

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 392 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

As William Van O'Connor says, " 'Victor

being a formula story, and is saved, insofar as
ful early passages in which a sense of the so
family is evoked with economy and wit"
"Victory" is rather trite and conventional,
where we are allowed to see Faulkner's skill with dialect and with
the use of significant and effective details. Its worst fault is that Gray
is not self-consistent as a character: he is presented to us as a man
stolid and unfeeling to the point of dullness; yet we are told that he
"had long since found out that no man has courage but that any man
may blunder blindly into valor as one stumbles into an open manhole in
the street" (p. 454)- a somewhat sophisticated and perceptive reflection
for such a rough, unlettered ranker, we are likely to feel.
But taken as one of this group of stories, "Victory" adds another
corollary to Faulkner's thesis: for we see that not only are the real
aristocrats doomed by war, but also that the humbler people who are
elevated to the mock-aristocracy of the officer-class are no less con-
demned. War, therefore, does more than destroy the conventional
and unrealistic values and ideals people bring to it; it creates its own
artificial set of values, which are no more to be depended on than those
of the aristocrats.
In many ways, "Crevasse" is a superior story, one of Faulkner's best.
Like "All the Dead Pilots," it has a very simple plot; but nowhere in
it does the author lapse into the self-pity of so much "lost generation"
fiction. It is told with admirable economy and understanding, and pro-
duces the same sense of nightmarish intensity we find in much of
Faulkner's best work.
We see the small infantry patrol proceeding over an old battlefield,
a wasteland where nothing, not even a bird or an insect, lives. The men
are frightened by the ominous stillness of the valley. Here, when he
has achieved a feeling of real suspense, Faulkner produces the disaster
in a superb fashion:

Then they all stop as one, in the attitudes of walking, in an utter

suspension, and stare at one another. Again the earth moves under their
feet. A man screams, high, like a woman or a horse; as the firm earth
shifts for a third time beneath them the officers whirl and see beyond
the down-plunging man a gaping hole with dry dust still crumbling
about the edges before the orifice crumbles again beneath a second
man. Then a crack springs like a sword slash beneath them all; the

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 WILLIAM FAULKNER 393

earth breaks under their feet and tilts l

framing a black yawn out of which, lik
unmistakable smell of rotted flesh, (p.

"Crevasse" may indeed be compared w

as another example of the successful imag
of war by a brilliant writer who has h
in combat.
The conclusion of "Crevasse" is, once m
eloquent, however, than in the other
moralizing effect of war, and of the usel
values as a defense against this destruct

On his hands and knees like a beast, the

making a hoarse sound. "Soon it will be
the air into his lungs faster than he ca
"Soon it will be summer, and the long d
the fourteen men kneel. The one in the
from which he is intoning monotonousl
man's gibberish rises, meaningless a
(P- 474) •

The last of the five stories, "Turnabout," is probably, after

"Crevasse," Faulkner's smoothest application of his style to the re-
straints imposed by the physical limitations of the short story. Indeed,
the purpose of "Turnabout" is so reportorial, so terse, so matter-of-fact,
that we may find it closer to the sort of work we associate with Hem-
ingway than to the more elaborate, involuted style which is charac-
teristic of Faulkner.
Superficially, "Turnabout" appears to be a sudden and surprising
denial of the negative attitude Faulkner had assumed in the earlier
four stories. True, there is death here, and there is a sense of the
fatigue and unrelenting tension caused by its constant presence. There
are Bogard and McGinnis, the two American flyers, who have no
illusions about the glory of combat: war is for them a nasty, dangerous
chore, not to be treated lightly. They are brave, but rationally so.
But the heroes of "Turnabout" are Claude and Ronnie, the childlike
British midshipmen who daily risk their lives in their little Channel
torpedo boat with a naive insouciance that shocks the business-like
Bogard. The archaic virtues of honor, courage, and patriotism still

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 394 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

matter to them: war is suggested as being a

rather than a stultifying, degrading experi
is to be gained.
In "Turnabout," therefore, we have a story
attitude toward war, hitherto anathematized by
this apparent ambiguity between "Turnabou
The answer is, of course, that Faulkner is no
last story. "Turnabout" is intended for th
amused, who wants to be reassured that cou
faith will ultimately triumph over evil. It is
it is hardly meant to be considered a sincere
the nature of war and on the behavior of t
in war.9
There is only one brief passage in "Turnab
it from the conventional slick magazine art
sembles: at the conclusion, spurred on by the
by the Englishmen, Bogard dives his bom
headquarters:

Then his hand dropped and he zoomed, and he held his aeroplane so,
in its wild snarl, his lips parted, his breath hissing, thinking: "God!
God! If they all were there- all the generals, the admirals, the presidents
and the kings- theirs, ours- all of them. (p. 509).

So, this last passage excepted, we must discount "Turnabout" as

another expression of Faulkner's theme in his war stories- that war is
a meaningless, wasteful evil which destroys the values and the integrity
of everyone involved in it who is sensitive enough to be affected by its
brutality; that the only ones who emerge unscathed from war are those
who, like the M. P. in "Ad Astra" and Spoomer in "All the Dead
Pilots." are so crude that they cannot feel war's emotional impact;
and those few who, like the subadar and the German in "Ad Astra,"
can realize that their identity as human beings can only be preserved
by discarding the trappings of society and recognizing the brotherhood
of man.

9. This is, in fact, the explanation suggested to me by Mr. Faulkner.

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